Silverbeet a Kiwi stalwart
Hands down the easiest crop to grow, once you plant silverbeet it will never leave you. This stalwart of the Kiwi kitchen garden is an excellent culinary replacement for its fussy cousin spinach and a great cut-and-come-again crop for adding to lasagnes, omelettes and stirfries.
SOW AND GROW
Get started: Silverbeet can be planted almost all year round across the whole country. You can sow it direct for most of the year too, but in the winter months start in damp seed-raising mix in seed trays or jiffy pots undercover (unless you live in the far north where you can sow this crop direct all year round).
STEP BY STEP
■ Sow each seed 2-3cm deep and about 5cm apart.
■ Thin to 40cm once plants have germinated in 10-14 days. You can eat the seedlings as salad greens.
■ Once the seedlings are up, give them a boost with liquid fertiliser diluted in tepid water.
■ Silverbeet is easy to grow from seed, but generally speaking, a punnet of six plants is more than enough silverbeet for an average-sized household. If you are planting seedlings, space plants 40cm apart and rows 60cm apart.
GROWING TIPS
Silverbeet grows best in a sunny spot with well-drained soil but can cope with a little shade. Prepare the soil with compost and sheep pellets before planting.
To harvest, twist and pull the individual outer stalks, leaving the emerging centres to grow. Don’t cut the stems when harvesting, as this leaves a stumpy bit of stem that rots back into the crown.
You can also sow silverbeet thickly in containers or buckets with drainage holes drilled in them and treat it as a baby salad green for the first six weeks or so, just snipping off leaves at the microgreen stage and adding it to salads. Silverbeet can cope well in the garden without extra watering but if growing it in pots, be sure to water it regularly.
Fortnightly feeds of liquid fertiliser will also boost growth.
As a biennial, silverbeet flowers and sets seed in its second year. Snap the main stalk off and it will send up a secondary crop of new shoots or leave the plants to self-seed.
STANDOUT VARIETIES
Fat-stalked ‘Fordhook Giant’ is the classic silverbeet with dark green leaves and white stems. ‘Dwarf variety ‘Compact Deep Green’ is a shorter-stemmed variety, making it good for pots. ‘Rainbow Lights’ has brightly coloured stems in shades of flamingo pink, raspberry red, saffron yellow and orange, and is particularly striking in the garden or choose pretty ‘Peppermint’ with pink-and-white stems. Crimson-stemmed ‘Ruby Chard’ and ‘Cardinal’ are the perfect colour match against crimson-flowering ‘Hughey’ broad beans, plus ‘Cardinal’ also has good resistance to fungal disease.
So-called perpetual spinach is related to silverbeet, although it usually has smaller leaves and thinner stems than most varieties.
TROUBLESHOOTING
If you can find a silverbeet plant without a snail hiding in the leaves, it must be an artificial plant! Remove slugs and snails by hand and wash leaves carefully after harvesting.
Young seedlings are particularly vulnerable to slugs and snails after a prolonged wet period or in spring, so consider protecting new plants with cloches.
The older the plants get, the more likely they’ll succumb to fungal leaf spots (cercospora) but this is cosmetic and doesn’t diminish their culinary value.
You can avoid this by growing the plants in full sun and keeping plants evenly watered. Disease is transferred by rain and watering, so avoid watering in the evening and splashing the leaves.